Posts tagged ‘depression’

You know those people who just refuse to stop changing your life? Who seemingly read your mind and know what to say even when you think it’s not what your mind wants them to say? Those people who can get away with saying stuff that you don’t let anybody else say? Those people who Keep Poking you Until You Think You’ll Crack? Those people who you sit and ruminate on your conversations for hours or days after?

I have one of those people in my life. She drives me up walls. Multiple walls. Multiple times a day, occasionally. She’s REALLY good at it.

I love her for it, afterwards, but in the moment? When she’s doing all that tricky life changing stuff? Ugh, it’s hard!

The other night I cried on her (literally) while she told me that I was a good person, I wasn’t a failure, that I didn’t suck at life, that I was all manner of good things, from compassionate to kind to smart. Sometimes I think she’s a little off in her assessment (and by “a little” I mean “on a different planet”). And it’s really, really hard for me to hear those things because I’ve never been told those things. And I’ve never had somebody who was OK with me crying, much less sat there and told me that it would be OK, that I’d come out of this slump, that I had the skills and the power to overcome the crap that was being thrown at me.

I don’t like it. I have no idea how to respond to it and it makes me uncomfortable and it makes me shut down cos I’m half embarrassed and half confused. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing, but it’s really difficult for me to lay there and accept that. Really, really difficult.

What is harder, though, is when I go home. And I sit in my living room trying to match up what she’s been saying with how I’m feeling. Trying to tie “you’re not a failure” in with feeling like a giant friggen failure, “you’re a good person” in with feeing like a selfish energy vampire.

But the fact is that somebody has said it. Somebody who I love and trust and who doesn’t lie about other things so as much as the emotional part of my brain says “BULLSHIT!” the logical part of my brain basically knows she’s not completely lying about this stuff, either.

I feel like I’m taking up too much time. Like I’m being an energy vampire to my friends, requiring so much from them. And then I find myself pulling away because I do not want them to dump me on my ass because they get sick of my energy vapirical ways. I just can’t trust that they aren’t going to completely shut me out soon because they are so sick of me.

So I’m breathing in and out, repeating the nice things other people are saying because my own mind certainly isn’t saying those things, and try to remember that I do love this world and that this is just a crappy time right now. And it’s not working very well. And repeating, over and over, that I am not an energy vampire, I am not an energy vampire. It is Ok to need help, and needing help doesn’t make me an energy vampire.